The second you have a baby, people begin offering you unsolicited advice. Friends, acquaintances and – most fun of all – complete strangers you definitely didn’t ask will inform you that your child isn’t dressed warmly enough, or that you have to enjoy every moment. I once had the latter while my two-month-old was spraying me with liquids from both ends, which the wise sage had apparently not noticed.
In the sea of interfering nonsense is the odd genuinely useful life raft, though, such as one I’ve just learned for dealing with the tween period I’m now navigating. Your child needs not a coat, but a codeword.
If they’re at a playdate, party or sleepover and for whatever reason they want to leave, they can’t call or message their parents and say that. So you need to indulge your inner secret agent, and be the buzzkill scapegoat for your kid taking an early bath.
This info was passed to me by a friend, but is also backed up by a now-viral post from a social media user whose teenage daughter had rung from a house party to ask if she could order a pepperoni pizza. The mum detailed their three-tier pizza-based code: if the daughter ask for “vegetable” that means she’s OK and just checking in, while “cheese” means the mum should call her back in five minutes with an excuse to come home, and “pepperoni” translates as come and get me immediately.
“I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t ask who was there. I just drove,” the mum wrote. When her daughter got in the car, she explained that the people she’d been with had started taking pills. “Codes work because they bypass the panic,” the mum – sorry, mom, because this happened in the US – concluded.
I’m stealing this. And I’m also now taking bets on whether my son or I will be the first to forget the code word, and therefore utterly bewildered about why the other is repeatedly whispering “ukulele” in a pointed way in our next chat.
Polly Hudson is a freelance writer
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